Baton Rouge Shooting Jolts a Nation on Edge

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At least three police officers were killed and several more were wounded on Sunday in Baton Rouge, La., near where protests had been held since the police shooting of Alton B. Sterling on July 5.Published OnJuly 17, 2016CreditImage by Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times

BATON ROUGE, La. — A gunman fatally shot three law enforcement officers and wounded three others here on Sunday before being killed in a shootout with the police. The attack’s motive was unclear as of Sunday evening, leaving an anxious nation to wonder whether the anger over recent police shootings had prompted another act of retaliation against officers.

What was clearer were the waves of worry that rushed across the United States as sketchy details emerged of a bloody melee Sunday morning on a workaday stretch of highway in Louisiana’s capital — a city that had already been rocked by the police shooting on July 5 of a black man, a purported murder plot against the police that was apparently foiled and many racially charged nights of protest and rage.

State and local officials speaking at a news conference here on Sunday afternoon did not address whether the law enforcement officers who were killed and wounded — three members of the Baton Rouge Police Department and three deputies from the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office — had been lured to the scene. Police officials said the officers had responded to a call about a man carrying a gun.

Officials initially believed that other people might have been involved in the attack, but the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, Col. Michael D. Edmonson, said at a news conference that it was the act of a lone gunman.

Some details about the gunman began to emerge late Sunday: Officials identified him as Gavin Long, an African-American military veteran. According to military records released by the Marine Corps, Mr. Long served as a data network specialist and was a sergeant when he left the Marines in 2010. He enlisted in his hometown, Kansas City, Mo., in 2005, and was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009, his records show. They also show a number of commendations, including the Good Conduct Medal.

On a social media site registered under the name Gavin Long, a young African-American man who refers to himself as “Cosmo” posted videos and podcasts and shared biographical and personal information that aligned with the information that the authorities had released, so far, about the gunman.

In one YouTube video, titled, “Protesting, Oppression and How to Deal with Bullies,” the man discusses the killings of African-American men at the hands of police officers, including the July 5 death here of Alton B. Sterling, and he advocates a bloody response instead of the protests that the deaths sparked.

“One hundred percent of revolutions, of victims fighting their oppressors,” he said, “have been successful through fighting back, through bloodshed. Zero have been successful just over simply protesting. It doesn’t — it has never worked and it never will. You got to fight back. That’s the only way that a bully knows to quit.”

“You’ve got to stand on your rights, just like George Washington did, just like the other white rebels they celebrate and salute did,” he added. “That’s what Nat Turner did. That’s what Malcolm did. You got to stand, man. You got to sacrifice.”

In one of a string of podcasts the man posted, titled, “My Story,” he expounded on the recurrence of the number seven in his life. “My father was born in 1947. My mother was born in 1957. And I took physical form on 7/17/87.”

Sunday was the man’s 29th birthday.

Around the country, political leaders, police officers and activists focused their attention, and their mourning, on the slain officers. They also sought to calm the tensions that welled up this month over the killings of black men by the police and the retaliatory violence directed at officers, including the July 7 killings of five officers in Dallas, carried out by a black man who said he wanted to kill white police officers.

Just last week, President Obama was in Dallas for a memorial service, and on Sunday afternoon, he was at the White House, again addressing the nation after an assault on police officers. He said the killings were “an attack on all of us.”

“We have our divisions, and they are not new,” he said, noting that the country was probably in store for some heated political speech during the Republican National Convention this week in Cleveland.

“Everyone right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further,” the president said. “We need to temper our words and open our hearts, all of us.”

Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said, “The violence, the hatred just has to stop.”

Colonel Edmonson said a call came in to police dispatch early Sunday reporting “a guy carrying a weapon” in the vicinity of the Hammond Aire Plaza shopping center on Airline Highway — a commercial thoroughfare dotted with carwashes, car dealerships and chain stores that cuts through a leafy residential neighborhood. It is also about a mile from the Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters, where protesters had held numerous rallies since July 5, when the police here fatally shot Mr. Sterling, after a confrontation in front of a convenience store.

On Sunday, around 8:40 a.m., law enforcement officers observed the man, wearing all black and holding a rifle, outside a beauty supply store, the colonel said. In the next four minutes, there were reports of shots fired and officers struck, said Colonel Edmonson, whose agency will take the lead on the investigation, helped by local and federal investigators.

Mark Clements, who lives near the shopping center, said in a telephone interview that he was in his backyard when he heard shots ring out. “I heard probably 10 to 12 gunshots go off,” he said. “We heard a bunch of sirens and choppers and everything since then.”

Avery Hall, 17, who works at a nearby carwash, said he was on his way to work when the gunfire erupted. “I was about to pull in at about 8:45, and we got caught in the crossfire,” he said. “I heard a lot of gunshots — a lot. I saw police ducking and shooting. I stopped and pulled into the Dodge dealership. I got out and heard more gunshots. We ducked.”

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Governor John Bel Edwards, Democrat of Louisiana, expressed outrage at the killings of three law enforcement officers who were fatally shot in Baton Rouge on Sunday. An earlier version of a caption with this video misstated the party affiliation of Governor John Bel Edwards of Louisiana. He is a Democrat, not a Republican.Published OnJuly 17, 2016CreditImage by Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times

On Sunday afternoon, officials said that two of the slain officers were Baton Rouge city police officers, and that the third was from the Sheriff’s Office. One city police officer and two sheriff’s deputies were wounded, including one who was in critical condition.

The shooting was the latest episode in a month of violence and extraordinary racial tension in the country. The night after the police shooting of Mr. Sterling, who was selling CDs outside a convenience store here, a black man was killed by the police during a traffic stop in a St. Paul suburb. The next night, five police officers were killed by a gunman in Dallas.

Speaking at the news conference, the police chief here, Carl Dabadie Jr., called the shooting “senseless” and asked people to pray for the officers and their families.

“We are going to get through this as a family,” he said, “and we’re going to get through this together.”

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After three police officers were killed and three were wounded in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday, the president discouraged polarization and violence.Published OnJuly 17, 2016CreditImage by Al Drago/The New York Times

The police in Baton Rouge had in recent days announced that they were investigating a plot by four people to target police officers, and they cited the threat to explain why their presence at local protests, which had been light at first, had grown heavy.

The police said a 17-year-old was arrested this month after running from a burglary of the Cash American Pawn Shop in Baton Rouge. He and three others, including a 12-year-old arrested on Friday, were believed to have broken into the pawnshop through the roof. It was unclear whether the burglary was connected to Sunday’s shooting.

Chief Dabadie told reporters at the time that the 17-year-old had told the police “that the reason the burglary was being done was to harm police officers.”

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An American flag was flown at half-staff near the scene of the shooting in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday.CreditJoe Penney/Reuters

The explanation, however, was met with skepticism on social media sites, where many people believed the report was concocted by the police to justify their militarized response to the protests after the death of Mr. Sterling.

“That was bull — it was a scare tactic to calm things down,” Arthur Reed of Stop the Killing, the group that first released the video of Mr. Sterling’s shooting, said on Sunday. “And it worked. I ain’t going out there if people are going to be out there trying to kill police.”

The intense protests had started to lose steam. Sima Atri, a lawyer who represented some of the protesters who were arrested last weekend, said recently that many protesters were afraid to hit the streets after the authorities’ aggressive approach last weekend, which included nearly 200 arrests. (Nearly 100 charges were dropped on Friday.)

A protest on Saturday afternoon attracted fewer than a dozen people, who huddled on the side of the road under a tent to escape the blazing sun and flashed signs at passing cars. They were mostly white; the protesters at large demonstrations shortly after Mr. Sterling’s death had been nearly all black.

Louisiana has lately taken a harder line to defend its police officers, who this year will become a protected class under the state’s hate crimes law.

The killing of the officers on Sunday occurred as hundreds of police officers trained in crowd-control tactics braced for protests outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Cat Brooks, the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, cautioned against criticizing activists after the attack on Sunday in Baton Rouge.

“I think anytime that there’s a loss of life — black, white, police officer, otherwise — it’s cause for us to take a moment and be sad about that life,” she said. “And I think we have to be really careful about where these shootings of police officers steer the conversation. I think it’s absurd to insinuate that a movement that is doing nothing more than demanding that the war on black life come to an end is in any way responsible for these police officers getting shot.”

Stephen Loomis, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, has urged people not to bring their guns anywhere near Cleveland’s downtown during the convention because officers are in a “heightened state.”

In Cleveland on Sunday, Steve Thacker, 57, of Westlake, Ohio, stood in the city’s Public Square holding a semiautomatic AR-15-style assault rifle — allowed under the state’s open-carry law — as news broke that several officers had been killed in Baton Rouge. When asked about Mr. Loomis’s comments and the Baton Rouge shooting, Mr. Thacker said that despite the attack, he wanted to make a statement and show that people could continue to openly carry their weapons.

“I pose no threat to anyone. I’m an American citizen. I’ve never been in trouble for anything,” said Mr. Thacker, an information technology engineer. “This is my time to come out and put my two cents’ worth in, albeit that it is a very strong statement.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated a part of the service record of Gavin Long. He served six months in Iraq, not a year.

Julie Bloom and Richard Fausset reported from Baton Rouge, and Mike McPhate from New York. Reporting was contributed by Alan Blinder from Dallas; Rick Rojas, Katie Rogers, Mike McIntire and Frances Robles from New York; Yamiche Alcindor from Cleveland; and Christiaan Mader from Baton Rouge.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Attack on Officers Jolts a Nation on Edge. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe